riting the truth to power is difficult, courageous, and uncertain in its effect. The importance of the late Gao Hua's How the Red Sun Rose is evidenced by the fact that it is banned in China despite having been first published in Chinese in Hong Kong in 2000 and reprinted twenty-odd times. The book is, as Joseph Esherick notes in the Forward, “widely known, broadly respected, and officially proscribed.”
This highly detailed and somewhat narrowly focused history of the rise of Mao Zedong to supreme power within the Chinese Communist Party between 1930 and 1945 has now been published in English thanks to Hong Kong's Chinese University Press and the translation of Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian. The book's author, who taught at Nanjing University, died in December 2012.
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